


Hydrogen Heart

by eternalchill



Series: is there anybody out there? [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Creation Myth, Implied/Referenced Torture, Original Character(s), POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-22
Updated: 2017-11-22
Packaged: 2019-02-05 08:19:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12790527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternalchill/pseuds/eternalchill
Summary: Death is never a cruelty





	Hydrogen Heart

The first star creates her; roaring helium and hydrogen fire that fills her veins with iron and her mind with combustion. She spreads, rapid and infecting like a virus as new stars burn into existence. Her touch leaves echoes of her presence on barren rocks with her empty breath fogging atmospheres.  The deep gouges of her nails and the placement of her palms make mountain ranges and dry ocean beds.

She leaves water and fire behind her and the small creatures fall from her skin and grow and grow and grow. The first one that falls into dust creates him.

He follows her, a swathe of nightmares and cool, damp skin. When he sits too long plagues start from the tips of his claws and devour the small creations she has left behind. The creatures that fall to dust find him waiting with an open mouth and snarling stomach.

She steals the souls from him sometimes, her sunfire hands reaching down his throat and burning him from the inside out.

He cannot touch the souls she takes. She watches him try, pitiful and struggling to do a task he cannot complete. They burn with her fire, small novas trapped beneath their skin and turn his teeth to ash. He follows them, a thousand different copies of himself stalking a thousand different souls.

* * *

 

“Why do you do this?” He asks her, his skin charred and eyes fogged with smoke.

She smiles, the emptiness of space behind her teeth and victory held between her hands. “Life is cruel.” She tells him.

His skin is stretched over bones and so thin she can see the impossible heart of his beating. There is a soul flickering in his stomach and she reaches down his throat, his teeth break on her skin and she pulls the soul out. He falls to the ground when her hand leaves his mouth, his breath wheezing and skin cracking. Acid falls from the breaks in his skin and the ground hisses and spits when it lands. In her hand, the soul flourishes, bright and hot as her hydrogen heart.

His eyes, vast, empty and blinded by her smoke, are sharp. “I am a kindness,” he tells her, “they will not thank you for this.”

* * *

 

She has teeth as wicked and as sharp as his and she shows them. “They will always thank me.”

“Do I know you?”

She looks over, the fake skin pulling and itching and lips parting over dull teeth. Smiling. “Do you?” There is coffee and stardust on her breath.

The boy shakes his  head, brow furrowed and soul-light spilling from his skin. Her touch never fades. “No, I suppose not. Sorry for--” he shrugs, half hearted and turns to leave.

She finishes her drink in a swallow, scalding liquid cool on her tongue and burning on her teeth. “Wait. Walk with me.”

He stops with a scoff, “I’m sorry?”

She has no time for patience, no practice with the whims of others. “Come.”

Uncertain, but caught by her pull and tied to her by his very soul he follows her. Outside, away from others and halfway down the street she asks him, “how many lives have you lived?”

He starts so violently she fears he has broken something. “What are talking about?”

“Tell me.”

“Three.” It comes out as a whisper, as a plea and as a prayer.

Consternation brews in her mind, “would you live a fourth?”

“No, I…” he takes a breath, eyes squinted up against the sun, “I was born as a bird the first time. A  _lactrodagus_ , I think. I was not of this world, so I guess it doesn’t matter. I loved it anyway, and if I could I would go back and live that life a thousand times. But the next time I was born as something in a lab. And every morning I wake up  _hoping_ that I won’t wake up there again.”

She thinks this is where he would show up, nightmare skin and dust breath all pointed to say  _I told you so_.

She tells the same thing to both boy and imagination, “Life is cruel.”

The boy laughs, “don’t I know it.”

* * *

 

She is cruel, a beast born of the stars and time before.

* * *

 

“Did they thank you?” There is no soul in his stomach and his ribs protrude like tent poles from his skin.

She snarls, anger bright and hot and shows him that she doesn’t need a soul in his stomach for him to scream.

* * *

 

She watches those she has made her playthings more carefully after that. She pulls them from bodies that she predicts will live awful lives and shoves them into bodies that are meant for better things. Under her ministrations, she knows the details of each soul intimately, better perhaps, than they themselves.

It doesn’t take her long for her to notice their numbers dropping. Fewer souls come back to her, and fewer still of those who have been hers for more than a few cycles.

She hunts him down when she realizes this, her wrath illuminating all the dark places she has known him to hide. It’s clear he was trying to flee when she finds him. His skin is still missing in places and his back is crooked and healed wrong, his teeth gone and mouth gummy. He would plead, she knows, but she had taken his tongue and burnt it to ash before him.

There are the slick remains of a soul on his hands and the haphazard stitches on his abdomen show a new stomach he is using in place of the one she’d taken. She guesses that what he’d done to himself hurt more than her taking the soul from inside him.

When she approaches him he stands frozen. She would take more from him for daring to take what is hers, but she needs her questions answered. She wants to know  _why._ He flinches when she puts her hand on his shoulder, then sags in defeat. She smiles with her teeth; she likes winning.

It takes barely a moment for all the wounds she’d caused to disappear like a bad dream. He vomits his replacement organs and doesn’t glare. He doesn’t look at her at all. It’s strange to watch him and not be watched back.

“I want them back.” She doesn’t ask, she demands.

“Who back?”

“The souls you took. Those who were mine.”

He laughs, bitter and angry and all the things he isn’t, “I can’t touch your souls.  _I’ve tried_.”

She frowns, “someone took them.” Something is building in her chest. Panic, she thinks.

He sits on the ground, the grass withering and drying to dust in a circle around him. His gaze is distant and glazed over like what he’s watching isn’t there before them. It isn’t, she’s guessing. “It’s not just your souls,” he says eventually, his mouth twisted like he sees some poor joke, “souls that are mine to take are missing as well.” He looks at the stretched skin of his arms and the bones that are outlined so sharply it looks like his skin may as well not be there at all. Distantly, she wonders if Death can die. It would be fitting, if needlessly ironic for it to be by her actions.

The black patch of grass grows, curving around her feet where the grass instead winds up above her knees and flowers wind around her toes. The very air hums with the magnitude of her unshielded presence. “Do something.” She says.

He takes a breath, releases it, then takes another. “Alright.” He bows his head, his neck curving and his back stretched serpentine. “The first one you took from me, where are they?”

“Why do you want them?”

“They were mine to take and mine to keep.” He flinches when she raises her hand, the claws that decorate them dazzling in her light. “ _But,_ ” he says quickly, “they are tied to you more strongly than any other, more like you than you could possibly understand.”

She breathes out the heat of stars to watch his skin crackle and blister, “and you do?”

He smiles wanly, his arms held out, “I walk with them all. I understand hopes and dreams and they promise all the riches of the world when I come to take them. The ones you take, we meet for fragments of a moment, but,” he shrugs, “the fragments add up. And they came to me willingly when they lived as a mortal god. They may be able to do something we cannot.”

“Okay.” She says.

“Okay?” He sounds nervous, “just… okay?”

“I want what takes what is mine, and I want it to know pain.” She snarls, her ire causing the flowers around her toes to wilt.

“Alright,” he breathes, “I’ll come up something.”

She looks at him, small and defeated and older than almost all things. Her cruelty so worn into his skin he can’t imagine disobeying and existing without forever trying to please.

“Life is cruel,” she tells him, a promise written in the stars stretching the depths of oceans. She places her hand on his head and pulls the pain from his bones, “and Death is kind.”

He snorts, “so?”

“The truth is mine to me and never yours to take. Give them a pretty lie to inspire  _creativity_. That is what you do.” She digs her claws into his skull, where the bones are soft and covered only by thin skin.

He pulls away from her, “I offer  _peace_ ,” he hisses, “from you. I lie because all things fear what they don’t know.”

“Then give them an answer.”

* * *

 

She follows the girl home, a boneless, invisible shadow with a hydrogen heart that answers a question made important by a lack of answers.

_What am I?_ The girl whispers in her mind while she spins a story with her fingers.

“You are mine.” Life answers.


End file.
